You'll Know You're An Adult When . . .

In August 2010, as a follow-up to my New York Times Magazinearticle about twentysomethings, the NPR show “The Takeaway” asked their listeners to write in with their responses to the question: “How will you know when you’re an adult?” I was tickled by the exercise – it was the tail end of my 15 minutes of fame after the Times article, which included appearing on "The Takeaway" with my daughter Samantha – and found several of the answers insightful and funny. Among my favorites (and I took the liberty here to clean up the distressingly frequent misspellings – does anyone finally feel like an adult through knowing how to spell "vacuum"?) are the following:

when you get excited over the silliest things, such as a new vacuum (Sarah from Michigan)

when you realize your parents aren’t as old as you thought (Reid from Memphis)

when your parents aren’t around to complain to, or to go to when life gets rough (Sharon from Lubbock)

when you go out to the garage, gather up all of your garden hose, connect it end to end, and the total length exceeds 300 feet (Steve from suburbia)

when friends start lending you their apartments and not the couch (Nicole from NJ)

when you accept responsibility for your mistakes (Marcus from Boston)

when no one wants your ideas carefully articulated on paper every day, and you’re not even close to being the cutest or cleverest person around (Jennifer from Greenwich Village)

when my parents asked what you want for your birthday and all you can think of is a self-defrosting refrigerator (Julie from New York)

I probably didn't think of myself as an adult until I'd already been married for two years and got a job that forced us to buy a car. Commuting from Evanston, Illinois out to Schaumberg every day listening to All Things Considered on the car radio -- that made me feel grown up in a way that years of public transit commuting never did, even though the commuting was to actual, grown-up jobs.

How about you? What is, or was, the "aha" moment that lets you know you're an adult?

I still do not necessarily feel like an adult but a major aha moment for how people perceive me as an adult was when my grandpa sent me a card for my 21st birthday without any money in it for the first time. I realized that even though people see you as an adult does not mean you actually feel like one. Thinking of my mother at my age with a baby, I realized that despite the fact that as a child you think your parents know everything because they are adults, it does not mean that they feel like one and they definitely do not know everything. I also definitely had a vacuum moment and I have a collection of dishes and silverware that excites me as much as any doll or toy ever did.